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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

For millennia, being "elite" meant owning land. In a primarily agrarian society, owning land is a huge advantage. So then, if that land is passed along hereditary lines, the establishment of a "landed aristocracy" is inevitable.

The risk in "meritocracy" is that we no longer live in an agrarian society. In the modern economy skills, training, and education are the surest means to success. We've replaced the "landed aristocracy" with the "educated aristocracy". This could only be considered a meritocracy if the potential to become educated was equally available to all, but the situation in America is further from that ideal than almost any other place in the world.

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I don't think it's the education that matters. It's as another commenter said, it's the ability to "visit the right clubs and (therefore) know the right people". Studying at Harvard isn't going to make you a millionaire. Being from a Harvard legacy family and already being a millionaire is going to make you a millionaire.

Your point about the value of owning land in the past was spot on. Several hundred years ago the primary occupation was subsistence farming, which requires a lot of fertile land. The most readily available source of energy was the photosynthetic energy from the sun stored in the trees of the forest, access to which also required lands. And the most healthful food sources were the animals who lived off of those lands. But today? We have a diversity of occupations, ample energy and plenty of food (in the developed western world at least). We have these things because of an increasingly complex web of progress and interdependence that's been enabled by technology. The resources that really matter in 2015 are human resources. The world is changing faster than any textbook can keep up with, faster than even the best teachers can understand and communicate to others. The only way to find and take advantage of the newest the rent seeking opportunities is to associate with the people who are creating them. Knowing a guy who knows a guy is the new nobility, and no amount of book learning can compete with being a member of the "in" crowd.

On the brighter side, society is exponentially more egalitarian than it was in the days of the landed aristocracy. If a man from Victorian England could observe the current level of social mobility (again, in the developed west) he would end up flat on his fainting couch. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent the wealthy from using their resources to give their kids a better life than everyone else has. Most people genuinely love their kids more than anything, who's to tell them that they can't spend money on what they hold most dear? The good news is that the long view paints a pretty picture. We're as far from aristocracy as we've ever been, and we're not going back any time soon.

>In the modern economy skills, training, and education are the surest means to success.

Nope. Still land:

http://mattbruenig.com/2013/06/13/whats-more-important-a-col...

actually it was never just land either. It used to be about owning land, debts, gold and slaves

Now it's about owning land, debts (bonds), gold and shares.

I can't find numbers on how many Americans own homes, but 67% of homes are occupied by their owner. That's quite a large aristocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

52% own stocks.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/162353/stock-ownership-stays-reco...

I'm too lazy to google bonds and gold (both easily available to anyone with a brokerage account).

The means to success seem pretty accessible based on these numbers.

Perhaps share of land / stocks / debts owned may be a better metric. Also, home ownership should be replaced with home equity ownership.

I think he meant that money-convertible assets, like land, bonds and shares are more important for the future increase in those assets than brains or education. Anyway, the bank usually own your house, not you. You're not a free man until you own your home and workplace debt-free.

Thee is a meaningless difference between renting and owning 50+% the value of your home.

Looks for the % of Americans that own 95% of their home and try again.

PS: Out of 300 million There are under ~21 million households that own their home actually own their home.

link for figures please :-)

Google: "home ownership without mortgage"

There was a few pages with similar numbers. EX:"More than 20 million American homeowners own their homes outright. No mortgage." http://www.cnbc.com/id/100370046#.

I used under 21 because there seems to be diffirent definitions of home owner. IE if you get a reverse mortgage are you still a home owner, how about a small home equity line of credit, own 2 houses and have more than 1 house of equity etc.

Actually, there is a very substantial difference. The world recognizes and honors that 50%. Particularly the credit markets do and in a liquidity event, you walk with the 50% in cash.

Now if you were to just up and stop paying your debts, you can lose it.

Assuming the market does not tank. Plenty of homes have lost more than 50% of their value.

Even when you "own" your home you don't really --try not paying those property taxes and see what happens.

>I can't find numbers on how many Americans own homes, but 67% of homes are occupied by their owner

...who has usually taken out a huge loan for the privilege, providing a stream of rents to the, uh, real aristocracy.

>52% own stocks.

Probably less than 1% could actually live off what they own, however, and rely primarily upon their labor for their income.

>The means to success seem pretty accessible based on these numbers.

Yes, well you intentionally made these numbers misleading didn't you? You didn't count the number of Americans whose incomes are derived wholly or nearly wholly from rents. You counted the proportion of Americans who owned at least one share.

As for owning one's home... were medieval peasants who owned a sliver of land aristocracy? According to you it sounds like it.

were medieval peasants who owned a sliver of land aristocracy? According to you it sounds like it.

I find the whole concept of "aristocracy" as applied to the US nonsensical.

Aristocracy is a form of government (rule by "the best"), and we simply don't have it. The fact that your mortgage payments go to a servicer who funnels it to a CDO who funnels it to Calpers doesn't mean that members of Calpers are aristocratic rulers of the US.

And let me remind you that the mortgage holders don't necessarily own any land.

>I find the whole concept of "aristocracy" as applied to the US nonsensical.

Of course you do.

>Aristocracy is a form of government (rule by "the best"), and we simply don't have it. The fact that your mortgage payments go to a servicer who funnels it to a CDO who funnels it to Calpers doesn't mean that members of Calpers are aristocratic rulers of the US.

Nope, the fact that the 1% own vastly more than Calpers or any other pension fund does mean that, though.

Slaves are still there, it's just that they are exploited through interest.

Paying mortgage isn't exactly slavery. Inappropes.

I think there are plenty of people in the world living in conditions close to slavery.

Yes, like, for example, victims of human trafficking. It's not the same as paying off a student loan though.

It's not exactly freedom either.

That's not the point. Any kind of contractual obligation isn't exactly freedom.

The point is, that the comparison is still bad.

Sorry, the definition of enslavement is coercion through direct and actual threat of physical violence and does not include other forms of exploitation.

i.e. "Slaves can be held from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

If you have a mortgage you can still refuse to work and just become homeless. Company men will not drag you kicking and screaming to your cubicle and force you back to you home in the evening to watch X-Factor until you vomit and pass out.

It's not that I want to understate the gravity of slavery, but to set the bar lower to what can be seen as slavery (which makes the common definition of slavery an even worse crime). You can get people to work without compensation in more deceitful ways than brute force.

middle class degree educated white males on HN complaining about a mortgage being slavery...

Interest leaves people impoverished and destroys families. But I'm sure you can see that from your mountain of moral superiority.

Usurious interest can leave people impoverished and destroys families, sure. But we're talking about mortgages, here, and in the general case interest leaves the price of homeownership about the same price as renting, provides additional stability and helps build families.

The real thing that leaves families impoverished and destroys them is when they have borrow half a million for a house to live in, only to find out that's only really worth about a quarter million a few years later during the economic crash, thus precluding them from actually selling it and moving somewhere that has an economy where they can work. That's principal, not interest.

I think the difference is that you get to choose whether to enter into the loan agreement, you're provided all the terms up front, and you have access to legal counseling prior to accepting the agreement.

If you have to make a mental association between your mortgage and institutionalized human suffering, maybe indentured servitude would be a better (but still ridiculous) fit.

Then it's a good thing 30 year mortgage interest APRs are lower than average YoY returns for mutual funds, so you can make more money investing your cash than you can save by paying off your mortgage.

Please take your racism somewhere else.

They are though.

Let's instead say 2x a person's annual income in credit card debt at 20% annual interest, a debt which was brought on by a number of short-term necessary but bad decisions, then left to grow for a couple of years due to unfortunate circumstances. That's the modern form of debt slavery, with no easy way of refinancing the debt or increasing the income. Such a scenario usually comes along with some other serious challenges, such as major health issues.

In the US, personal bankruptcy is an option. But not all Western countries have this luxury. In Norway, for instance, personal bankruptcy basically amounts to entering a 5-year contract of indentured servitude (you by law have to earn as much as you can, and get to use only the smallest possible amount of it to feed and clothe yourself - the debtors take the rest).

So, what should we call common slavery? Super-slavery?

"You can get people to work without compensation in more deceitful ways than brute force."

I think the term exploitation would cover this?

Even if there is some form of semi-institutionalized gouging, it's still not slavery.

So your definition doesn't include people who are effectively held hostage in a foreign country by having their passport taken away and forced to work in order to pay ridiculous fees to get it back?

Oh, that sort of interest. There is interest owed to established financial institutions and the there is interest "owed" to shady con men. The financial obligations might be a form of coercion in this instance?

Yes, shady con men, albeit ones operating with a great deal of organization and structure. There is a ton of this going on in places like the UAE[0] and Qatar[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Ara...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Qatar#Immigran...

I think they call that "taking rents" in general.

On the contrary, I'd say the ability to become educated is more accessible than ever before.

Consider the example of foreign language immersion. I picked up conversational Portuguese this year from Duolingo (a free app, admittedly requiring a 249rs/month data connection). Duolingo just released English for Hindi a few months ago which will do more to make English language education accessible than even the Catholic Church did [1]. Or consider coding - again, free from codeacademy.com or learnXthehardway. Same for math from Khan Academy and Wikipedia.

Lets distinguish access to education from access to certification. Access to education has never been more available than it is now.

[1] For those unfamiliar, many (non-Christian) Indian parents pay way too much money to send their kids to Catholic school for English language education. Secular English education is ridiculously expensive.

It's not just certification, it's also the human/social part of education. There's an enormous jump between having the material available, and actually putting in the years of investment necessary to make yourself employable in that area.

I am still not sure about this whole subject. You are absolutely right - with internet access education is basically free and ubiquitous.

But the more important thing is in my opinion some kind of "drive" or "stickiness". We all know about the ridiculous high drop out rate from most MOOC courses. I think it might be that it is far less about education what makes kids succeed, but parents who are able to show their kids - may it be by example, by preaching, by pushing them - that they have to stick with things, even when it is "not fun", in order to succeed.

But this can compensate this with money - it allows you to push a kid in some kind of system (boarding school, etc) where it is more painful (social pressure, etc) to not stick with something (school) than otherwise.

I've thought about this a LOT, as a person who hated school growing up and makes a living with skills I picked up almost entirely online.

I think the current system of traditional schools and online courses is a sort of awkward/silly transition state. Online education (as far as I've seen) is trying too hard to become some sort of 'school-but-in-the-cloud'. It would be like selling MP3s through record-stores-in-the-cloud in album form, ignoring things like YouTube and Spotify.

Online education shouldn't (in my opinion) be about MOOC courses. It should be about literally figuring out what you want to do, finding people who can help you, building actual relationships with real people doing real work, and then literally getting involved and literally doing stuff. More like massively-distributed-apprenticeships.

It's already happening, and I'm a proud early case study.

I'm only responding to the idea that the potential to be educated is not well distributed. It's the ability and willingness to exploit that potential which is not evenly distributed.

We've replaced a landed aristocracy with a financial aristocracy.

Modern aristocrats farm money, in the form of rents paid for access to money. Land ownership is a useful byproduct.

It's still a feudal system. In the same way medieval peasants were tied to their lord's demesne, the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.

Education will only get someone so far towards becoming a financial farmer.

The irony is that money is a fiction anyway, and socially it's just a proxy for executive power.

So when the aristocratic class decided to 'fund' a project they're simply giving it an aristocratic nod - which they only do if they believe there's an acceptable chance they can benefit from it personally.

No actual stuff flows from one person to another. There's just a temporary infusion of transferred political power and status.

>the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.

This comment being posted on HN is quite ironic. Unless you are philosophically opposed to the Internet there have never been more options for capital access or less reliance on local "aristocracy". The contortions needed to make these kind of arguments should give some indication of their veracity.

That the aristocracy is not geographically local makes it less socially humiliating to ask them for help, but the arrangement is still financially problematic.

That the aristocracy has become more abstract does not mean it has ceased to exist.

If the aristocracy has become so abstract that it includes Kickstarter then the word has lost all meaning.

1. Kickstarter is very new 2. Kickstarter is so small as to basically being a rounding error

So when Kickstarter is bigger or if you consider all crowdfunding then it is an aristocracy? My point still holds. If reality gets in the way of dogma you might want to abandon your dogma.

Your esoteric examples are irrelevant. Come back when a significant percentage of the population finance their house with crowdfunding rather than a mortgage. You seem to be grasping at straws to defend your dogma, and quite honestly you drew a pretty short straw.

As a former teacher, I agree with you completely here. Through high school, the good teachers are as much motivators as they are instructors. That never seems to get mentioned in discussions on "the future of education".

This is why I firmly believe that while the future of education will be digitally mediated, the profession of teaching will grow towards "very high-touch instructor" rather than "supplemental tutor".

The digital tools will allow for significantly richer personalization - both with respect to the content being learned, as well as the facilitation of that learning via a skilled instructor. And, while we have the beginnings of these (digital/conceptual/pedagogical)tools, we don't a public conception yet of what this will actually look like.

I don't think that education is the way into the elite class. I think that if you are elite, then you will probably be educated, so you'll naturally see a gap in education between elites and commoners.

But I don't think being a doctor, lawyer, or Goldman-Sachs programmer, automatically makes you an elite. Owning a home doesn't make you an elite.

Having the capacity for power and influence, imo, makes you an elite. You don't necessarily need to express your power, but if you have no power to express except for buying a nice home, education, car, and so on, then I don't think you have power. Power is the ability to substantively influence political, social, or economic spheres. Bill O' Reilly has power. Peter Thiel has power. Bill Gates has power.

Because I really have to say, how are you an elite if you seem to lack so much say over the world around you? It almost looks like you are a luxurious piece of driftwood, bobbing to force of massive tides.

A lot of people have this standard of elite where if it's better than 99% of the world, then you must be an elite. But then I look at that remaining 1%, and I find too many servants of the elites (I consider a normal doctor to be a servant of the elites), which is why I don't like that capricious cutoff point. We should be focused on a more interesting question:

How do we describe power? Who has it? How much do they have? How does their power work? That's what I want to know when I drive an inquiry around "elitism".

Just replace "land" with "means of production" and you have updated your agrarian model to an industrial one.

I don't think education is quite as important as it is made out here, rather it is a confounding factor. Owning the means of production (being rich) is what makes you rich(er).

The import of education applies mostly to the middle class.

Let's also note that education doesn't fix poverty, any more than queue-jumping fixes queues.

There is a small number of high socio-economic status positions available at any point, and who gets those is determined mostly by how rich their parents are.

Meanwhile those at the lower end must live short stressful lives, fraught with misery, overwork and income insecurity, all the while being lectured that they are the "takers" by the media.

It's not quite zero-sum, but you certainly have a point. I guess if everyone had the same abilities engineers and janitors would get paid the same since they would have equal negotiation power. Managers, high-level salesmen on the other hand would keep their pay, since network is by definition exclusive. Same with the capital elite, which always need good networks with each other and government, not to mention that money grows exponentially - even a small initial advantage leads to dominance over time.

It seems someone has to end up on top, even if we were all equal.

Agreed completely that land is hugely advantageous in agrarian society, yes.

Here's the thing though- landowners don't just own land. They receive disproportionate profits and dividends from charging others for the use of that land. They (broadly speaking) collect rent, which they can then use to build schools, pay teachers, build banks, collect interest, so on and so forth.

The descendants of landowners have the most resources, which allow them to get the best education, the best skills, the best referrals, the best jobs, best networks. In land-scarce Singapore, for instance, about 50% of top students in primary school come from families who own landed property- the elites, who make up about 16% of the population.

It's wonderful that commoners can now also compete- a man like Barack Obama could become President- but there's still a long way to go.

That said, "America is further from that ideal than almost any other place in the world" strikes me as rather... naive? There are more than 6.5 billion people outside America, and there are still people with no access to schooling whatsoever, no basic literacy, etc.

America is nevertheless in a very poor place given its economical ranking

Didn't Piketty give this a pretty good treatment?

+1 Yes he did. At least he convinced me that a very small yearly tax on capital/resources over a (large) threshold is a good idea. His book changed my mind on this subject.

>This could only be considered a meritocracy if the potential to become educated was equally available to all, but the situation in America is further from that ideal than almost any other place in the world.

This is part of Europe's cartoon view of America. The educational problems in the US are largely cultural.

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